Gurgaon based game servicing firm Lakshya Digital plans to hire around 350 creative professionals within 3-4 years. The company aims to become a market leader with one of the largest team of artists globally.
“We want to occupy the top position globally in game design segment. For this, we are working to double our team of around 350 artists in the next 3-4 years to create one of the world’s largest game designing team,” Lakshya Digital CEO Manvendra Shukul.
Headquartered in Gurgaon, Lakshya Digital has served more than 50 big and small game publishers and developers including Disney, Naughty Dog, EA, Ubisoft, Rockstar, Yukes and Vivendi.
The company currently has three game studios located in Gurgaon, Pune and Seattle, along with an office in San Diego, California, USA.
“We have just set up our studio in Seattle, USA and in the next year to year-and-a-half, we intend to set up another games development studio overseas to address global markets,” Shukul said.
The company has also set up an InGame Institute for training creative people in game designing to create talent pool for the company.
“We are hiring across all age groups. We only see creativity in a person. At InGame, we invest about Rs 20 lakh every year to train around 30 people so that we can put them on job.
“We are also looking at setting up two new studios at Kolkata and Hyderabad. One of this will be opened in 2016,” Shukul added.
He said companies are now looking at India for outsourcing games design after China, which is a huge growth opportunity for the company.
“Average salary of game designers in China is in the range of USD 12,000-15,000 per month and in India, it is in the range of USD 8,000-12,000 per month.
“Indian companies can deliver same quality of work at one-third cost so everyone is now increasingly looking at outsourcing their projects to India,” Shukul said.
When asked if the company plans to diversify its business into other segments where digital arts are required, Shukul said that even after doubling team size, the company will still run short of talent as there are too many projects coming to India.
In an exclusive conversation with AnimationXpress.com, Lakshya Digital, co-founder and CEO Manvendra Shukul mentioned that hiring has been always on the mind of the company, scale new heights of success and make it the world’s largest team of artists.
“Right now our focus is to ensure that we create all the process structures and infrastructure which allows us to aim our long term objective. Our immediate goal would be on developing skills, processes and create a foundation for that long term objective. If you don’t have right people, it is not going to take you anywhere. It’s not just the question of adding numbers but adding numbers that help you take your impetus forward,” expounds Manvendra.
“For any long term plan you need resources, funding and efforts and Keywords Studio is helping us with that. Since Keywords has global reach and studios across 9 countries, it also helps us to reach to a lot of different clients making it easy for us geographically. It also increases our client base and that is a big help,” he states further.
On quizzing why specifically Kolkata and Hyderabad were chosen for the training institutes, Manvendra said, “Kolkata and Hyderabad are the places where you have a lot raw talent and that’s the nature of the talent we want. These are the places where talent needs to be further strengthened and become game ready. Our experience tells us, there is a lot of raw talent in the region but no real expertise in the game space. If there is a pool of talent – that is where you want to be and make sure those guys are guided towards the game space. You may be an artist but it takes a lot of levels and skills to become a game artist, hence we are looking at the these two locations.”
And what are the skills that Lakshya Digital looks at when it is hiring?
“What we primarily look at is that an artist needs to be first a good animator and needs to know a little about game art, if you have the skills and know the tools we’ll train you further. Training is something we’ll take care of, but you need to know the basics, you need to have a good sense of art, creativity and understand the form and we’ll develop you further from there,” ends Manvendra.